Designing the Garden: Getting Grounded in Linked Data
#rwlod
Jenn Riley (@jenlrile)
Associate Dean, Digital Initiatives
McGill University
"Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.”
--Shakespeare, The Tempest
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Photo by Liam Moloney, https://flic.kr/p/7Qux27, CC BY-SA
1. It’s not “our” data and “their” data – it’s one big graph.
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Graph-based world views
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2015/06/06/querying-rdf-data-with-text-annotated-graphs/
Connecting things together
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
dbpedia:William_Shakespeare
1615-04-23
1564-04-26
dbpedia:Stratford-
upon-Avon
dbpedia-owl:birthDate
worldcat-work:10745266
81
fast:1069678 # Political Refugees
“Tragicomedy’
“Shakespeare’s Comedy of the
Tempest”
schema:genre
viaf:96994048
# William Shakespeare
foaf:person
rdf: type
schema: CreativeWork
rdf: type
Creating so much data!
Where the scope of “library data” ends
What it is and isn’t “our job” to do
Making “complete” descriptions ourselves
Mapping data from “other” vocabularies into “library” vocabularies
This means we can stop worrying about…
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Learning other metadata cultures
Being Linked Data ecosystem good citizens
How the technology and the data can most effectively work together
Making connections between things
Understanding other vocabularies and communities
And start worrying about…
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
2. We can expect more intelligence in the system.
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Guido Reni (1575-1642)
Hercules Killing the Hydra of Lerna
c. 1620-1621
oil on canvas
commissioned along with other scenes from the mythology of Hercules in 1617 by FerdinandoGonzaga, for a room in the Villa Favorita in Mantua, Italy inv. 535
Musée du Louvre, Paris, France
Mine usage data to enhance relevance and utility in discovery
Start from the most relevant information and provide easy means for quick expansion on demand
Coherently display conflicting information
Give indications of provenance of information
What systems must do for users
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
If we’re serious about information literacy, we have to
give our users tools and thentrust them.
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Flag dead ends for review and action
Normalize most string-based data
Highlight potentially conflicting information
Hide complexity (URIs, etc)
Mine and show candidate connections for review
What systems must do for metadata maintainers
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Choosing one authoritative “correct” assertion in the face of conflicting data
Whether or not a given source meets a certain standard for authority
Authorized headings, access points
And textual justifications for them
A large proportion of the data cleanup tasks we used to do
For example, the formatting of strings
But we can expect a new set of these to emerge!
This means we can stop worrying about…
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
How to enhance system algorithms
How users best interact with complicated information
Methods for automated metadata creation and cleanup
Getting large amounts of new data into the system
And start worrying about…
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
3. The information age has provided a new definition of “authority.”
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Current narrative:
Libraries create good metadata!
Because we’re trained to do so
We’re consistent and follow rules
That’s what makes good data
Other people create bad data
Because it’s not consistent
Using a well built record structure is a key part of good metadata
But…
We don’t read the books we catalogue
We don’t typically have expertise in the subjects of the works we describe
Sometimes we don’t even read or speak the language those works use
Our perspective is pretty different from our users’
Number of things to describe is quickly expanding and our budgets are shrinking
Let’s take a good, hard look at our “authoritative” data
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Remember, we’re looking at more intelligent systems in the LD world
That can deal with inconsistency, masking it or cleaning it up
The LD graph allows us to not worry about metadata structures
So consistency and rules are no longer the primary drivers of good metadata
Which means we can turn large swaths of the creation of metadata over to domain experts
Wait, it’s not about consistency and rules?
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:5h73q9544
If we’re serious about good metadata, we need to start from
expert information.
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
We need this guy
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
http://www.betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/scholars-lose-themselves-in-their-research/
And we need these folks too!
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Photo by veggiesosage, https://flic.kr/p/5WjAsK, CC-BY-NC-ND
Really, it’s going to be OK
https://xkcd.com/386/
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
The Linked Data community cares about provenance
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/provenance#w3c_all
Deep research on materials for which there’s already a knowledgeable community
Descriptions being “complete”
Making sure everything is “right”
This means we can stop worrying about…
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Mining the data that’s already out there
Promoting voices of those who engage with content
How usable systems can be built to generate Linked Data from activities real people already partake in
Seeding basic information for the rare and unique materials we hold that have never been released
Connecting data from communities operating in different languages
And start worrying about…
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Metadata is an ecosystem
Photo by Temari 09, https://flic.kr/p/6UskT1, CC-BY-NC
The garden needs tending
Photo by Center for International Forestry Research, https://flic.kr/p/dbx1Gt,CC-BY-NC-ND
“Original cataloguing” and “copy cataloguing”
Getting data into “our systems”
Doing all the work that needs to be done the first time we think about a specific item
This means we can stop worrying about…
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
Understanding the Linked Data environment
Locating large and useful datasets
Understanding vocabularies developed elsewhere
Finding good people that can analyze relationships and make new connections
And start worrying about…
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
The data and systems are all in the cloud
Library-based discovery less important but likely still around for a while
Several ways systems can navigate the graph
Crawling
Dereferencing
Query federation
(See http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/#htoc84)
So how will Linked Data systems work?
This is all the way it should work
It’s going to be a while before we get there
Big effort needed to start connecting up these data sets
Data sets and tools will get better as we start using the data in this way and demand more
The library community can help to shape this evolution, but only if we fully understand and engage with the assumptions and mechanisms in play in the Linked Data community
Reality check
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
This will be hard. But that won’t stop us.
We need to redefine our baseline.
We need to rethink what new models mean for us.
And, most importantly, we need to put the right people in positions to work through these issues and get the details settled.
A sea-change? Most definitely.
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
We got this.
@jenlrile
These presentation slides: http://www.jennriley.com/presentations/alaannual2015/riley-garden.pptx
Thank you!
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015
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